Running (Treadmill) 30:00 [3] **
Finally over my cold, and just in time!
I ran on the treadmill today, there's a bit of a snowstorm in Boston. Hopefully it won't affect my flight tomorrow. I brought my middle distance map from NAOC to read while I ran. It was my most recent A meet, and it felt good to review it- what went well, what went wrong. I had a lot of variability on the middle, some legs were great, some were pretty bad.
As I was looking over it, my first major mistake was, well, control 1. In this case, the first control was very tricky. It was in an area without a lot of distinct features, and there were a lot of other controls. I should have been more cautious, but I was just so ready to start and get going. This time I'll make sure I don't start out overconfident, and will take a conservative route on the first control.
Control 5 was pretty hard as well, with a lot of similar features in the area. I bailed out to a line of cliffs nearby and relocated eventually, but should have done that sooner. I probably should have slowed down as I approached the control as well. The first part of the leg was easy, but then got trickier. If I'd recognized this and adjusted my speed, I might have had a better time on this one.
Control 10 was deceptive. It looked very easy, and should have been very easy. So easy in fact, that I got overconfident and started running pretty fast. I then made a pretty horrible parallel error. I was convinced the control was on the hill I was on, when it was the next hill over. This time if I don't see the control immediately, instead of scouring the feature I think it's on I should glance at my map and look for similar features I might have confused. Forty minutes into the course has historically been where I start losing focus and just running, so I'll watch for that this time.
One thing I think I did well was staying focused at the end, even with the arena set up and the proximity of the finish, so I had a strong finish. I did much better the following day, I think I just needed that first day to get my head into the map. I'll definitely spend a lot of time on the model tomorrow.
Running wise I felt good, and felt best about 20min into the run. I'll keep that in mind when warming up.